Life of Pi – Chapter 7 Summary
Chapter 7 Summary
Chapter 7 introduces us to one of the most important figures in Pi’s education, his biology teacher Mr. Satish Kumar, and it raises for the first time something that is going to run through the entire novel, which is the relationship between science, religion and faith.
First, the description of Mr. Kumar, because Pi gives us quite a picture. The man is geometrically peculiar. His head is bald and pointy on top but has these enormous impressive jowls at the base. Narrow shoulders give way to a massive stomach that Pi describes as looking like the base of a mountain, except the mountain hangs in thin air because it stops abruptly and disappears into his trousers. His legs are like sticks and yet somehow carry all of this, bending in directions that seem improbable. Pi sums him up as two triangles, a small one balanced on top of a larger one, balanced on two parallel lines. Warty, with sprigs of black hair coming out of his ears. But friendly, with a smile that seemed to take up the entire base of his triangular head. It is a funny and affectionate portrait and you can tell Pi genuinely liked the man.
Mr. Kumar was also an active Communist who was always hoping Tamil Nadu would stop electing movie stars and follow Kerala’s political example instead. But his most significant characteristic, the one that matters most to this chapter, is that he was the first openly declared atheist Pi had ever met.
Pi discovers this not in a classroom but at the zoo, where Mr. Kumar turns out to be a regular visitor. To Mr. Kumar the zoo is his temple, which is an interesting word choice for an atheist. Every animal he sees is a triumph of logic and mechanics. Nature as a whole is simply an exceptionally fine illustration of science. Pi imagines that when animals feel the urge to mate they are saying “Gregor Mendel,” father of genetics, and when they show their strength they are saying “Charles Darwin,” father of natural selection. All their sounds are just the thick accents of science speaking. Mr. Kumar visits the zoo to take the pulse of the universe and always leaves feeling scientifically refreshed.
The first time Pi spots him at the zoo he is too shy to approach. But Mr. Kumar sees him at the rhinoceros pit and waves him over. This leads to a small but lovely digression about the zoo’s two Indian rhinos, Peak and Summit. When Peak first arrived as a young wild male he was showing signs of suffering from isolation and was eating less and less. As a temporary solution, Pi’s father tried introducing a herd of goats to keep Peak company. It worked better than anyone expected. Peak and the goats became completely inseparable, even after Summit arrived. The rhinos and the goats ate together and guarded each other and the public loved it. It is a small story but it fits perfectly into the novel’s larger interest in unexpected companionship between different creatures.
Standing at the rhino pit, Mr. Kumar makes a joke about politicians needing the good sense of rhinos rather than just their armour plating. Pi, who admits he knew little about politics at the time, feels he should contribute something to the conversation. So he says, simply and genuinely, “Religion will save us.”
Mr. Kumar’s response is immediate and cheerful. He does not believe in religion. Religion, he says, is darkness.
Pi is genuinely confused by this. To him religion has always been light, not darkness. He wonders if Mr. Kumar is testing him the way he sometimes would in class, saying something deliberately wrong to see if a student would correct him. But no, Mr. Kumar means it completely. There are no grounds, he says, for going beyond a scientific explanation of reality. A clear intellect and close attention to detail will expose religion as superstitious nonsense. God does not exist.
Then Mr. Kumar says something more personal and more painful. He tells Pi that when he was Pi’s age he was in bed with polio. Every day he asked where God was. God never came. It was medicine that saved him, not God. Reason is his prophet, and reason tells him that when a watch stops, we die and that is the end. If the watch is broken it must be fixed by us, here and now.
Pi listens to all of this but says nothing. Not because he is afraid of Mr. Kumar’s authority, but because he is afraid that a few carelessly thrown words might destroy something he loves. He wonders what a terrible disease polio must be, if it could kill God in a man. That is a striking and compassionate way for a young boy to think about someone else’s loss of faith.
Mr. Kumar walks away pitching and rolling on perfectly flat ground, calls back a reminder about Tuesday’s test, addresses Pi as 3.14, and is gone.
And yet, despite all of this, Mr. Kumar became Pi’s favourite teacher at Petit Seminaire and the direct reason Pi later studied zoology at the University of Toronto. Pi felt a genuine kinship with him. And here Pi says something that is one of the most important lines in the whole novel so far. He says that atheists are his brothers and sisters of a different faith, and that every word they speak speaks of faith. Like Pi, they follow reason as far as it will carry them and then they leap. The leap itself is an act of faith, even if what they are leaping toward is the belief that there is nothing beyond reason.
But Pi does draw a distinction, and he draws it firmly. It is not atheists who trouble him. It is agnostics. Doubt, he says, is useful for a while. We all have to pass through our own garden of Gethsemane, the place where Christ himself wrestled with doubt and fear before his crucifixion. If Christ could cry out from the cross asking why God had forsaken him, then humans are certainly permitted their own doubt. But at some point you have to move through it and choose. To make doubt itself your permanent philosophy is, Pi says, like choosing immobility as a means of transportation. It gets you nowhere.
That final image is simple and perfect and it tells you everything about how Pi approaches both faith and life. He is not someone who can afford to stay still.
